The present invention concerns a method and device for communicating information. It applies in particular to high-performance buses such as the bus complying with IEEE 1394 (the name of a standard of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers: “IEEE Standard for a High Performance Serial Bus” published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Inc. Draft 8.0v2, IEEEP1394, 7 Jul. 1995).
On such a bus, appliances using different data formats can coexist. For example, in the field of audio and video data transmission, the data formats known as:                “DIGITAL VIDEO”, a digital video compression format supported by more than 55 commercial companies, in accordance with the DV standard IEC 61834 or the document “Specifications of consumer-use digital VCRs using 6.3 mm magnetic tape”, published in December 1994 by the “HD Digital VCR Conference”, known as the “Blue Book”,        “MPEG2” (acronym of “Moving Pictures Expert Group”), ISO/CCITT standard on digital compression for the compression of audio video sequences (references: ISO/IEC 13818-1, 13818-2 and 13818-3), and        “JPEG 2000” (acronym of “Joint Photographic Expert Group”), ISO/CCITT standard on digital compression use for the compression of fixed images, with or without encrypting, with or without data compression and with or without organisation of data groups,can be simultaneously used by different peripherals. These appliances may have to communicate with each other.        
It is known, in the state of the art, to interpose, between each peripheral and the bus used, or to integrate in the peripheral, a “codec” (abbreviation of “coder-decoder”), or an adaptor, which decodes the format of the data passing over the bus and encodes them in the data format used by the peripheral in question. This solution is not satisfactory since it entails the use of a codec for each peripheral.